By Oliver Herring - Emma - Pink (detail)
Oliver Herring
Teens With Masks
April 25 - June 13
opening reception Saturday, April 25, 6-8pm
Max Protetch Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new work by Oliver Herring. Both the largescale photographic collages that make up Teens with Masks and the action in the video Make Believe in Regent Park are heavily influenced by a teenage obsession with play violence.
The pieces are among the products of workshops Herring has conducted with teenagers in the last several years related to the self-generating platform TASK, which he facilitates for people in order to provide an open-ended and adventurous outlet for them to express themselves. The TASK workshops sometimes later provide material for Herring's layered and often labor-intensive work in the studio and the editing room.
The collages Teens with Masks are portraits of teenagers who worked with Herring in his studio during the summer of 2007. Herring took portraits of the teenagers following a TASK workshop in which they enacted a randomly-drawn task which instructed them to "Make a knife and kill someone." Herring later embellished each unique portrait in the studio, building up relief-like areas from museum board and reflective photographic paper to create intricate patterns and varying levels of abstraction based on thephotographic image.
Make Believe in Regent Park was filmed in a housing project populated by immigrant communities in Toronto. The teenagers that took part in this project largely controlled the action in front of the camera. The playful engagement among the mostly Muslim teenagers from different cultures is characterized by a
breakdown of traditional gender roles, Rambo-like fight scenes and self-made music.
Herring wishes to thank the students that were part of the Youth and Community Programs of the Whitney Museum in 2007 and the teenagers who took part in Streetscape as part of Toronto's Luminato festival in 2008.
Oliver Herring is currently the subject of a 15-year retrospective at the Tang Museum and Art Gallery in Saratoga Springs; entitled Me Us Them, the exhibition is on view through June 14. Upcoming shows include a solo exhibition at the Frist Center for the Visual Arts, Nashville (October); the 10th Lyon Biennale, which opens in September and is curated by Hou Hanru; and a video shoot with live music as part of Performa in November.
